Democrats Have a Real Problem, Part X
The Internet
One of the most frustrating things about the mainstream media during the administration of President Donald Trump is watching as it continues to labor under the unshakeable belief that it controls a story’s narrative.
Media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, etc. all transparently spin stories in their anti-Trump zeal rather than report and persuade from the truth. They do this by omitting inconvenient facts, cherry-picking convenient ones, focusing on false equivalencies, and/or straight up lying rather than presenting a complete, objective accounting and using it to present a compelling argument that anticipates and addresses the opposing perspective. This despite at least five years of having the strategy boomerang on them to their detriment.
Over an over in spectacular fashion.
The most famous example of this is the 2016 presidential election in which the MSM went all in for Hillary Clinton. After endorsing her almost unanimously and turning their newsrooms into veritable extensions of the anti-Trump #Resistance, the media laid waste to its credibility outside Democrat echo chambers only to watch Trump ascend to the White House.
Virtually every outlet of national prominence pretended Clinton’s email scandal was exclusively about national security and sloughed the fiasco off as a tempest in a teapot, ignoring that millions of Americans rightfully found it to be yet another problematic example of Hillary breaking rules to defeat governmental transparency. When the DNC and other Dems got hacked, the media circled the wagons around the Clinton campaign and focused on the source of the hack—RUSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA!—rather than the perfectly accurate and disturbing information revealed by them (e.g. DNC scheming against Bernie Sanders, hacks like Magger Haberman offering chosen politicians a light touch, etc.). Much of the media pretended HRC was “fundamentally honest” in the face of many documented, egregious lies. The MSM declared in unison that Hillary was the most qualified presidential candidate in history because of bullet points on her resume, again ignoring that the record represented by the bullet points justifiably repulsed millions of voters. Some outright propagandists went so far as to call the former Senator “popular” while the truth was the opposite and historically so.
Unfortunately for the media and Hillary Clinton, the Internet existed in 2016. And it exists now.
Consequently, the most powerful media entities in the country no longer control the narrative and they didn’t back then. So when the NYT, CBS, and friends pulled out every stop to the point of distorting reality in order to elect their chosen candidate, voters could simply find said reality through alternate sources on both the right and left. In the process, the media outlets (a) moved themselves beyond redemption in many voters’ eyes; and (b) sacrificed any influence over the voters their candidate most needed.
Coincidentally, we now have Donnie 45.
This is a real problem for the Democratic Party because the media is doing the exact same thing in 2020. In its anti-Trump zeal to elect anyone but Donald and finally purge him from the Oval Office, the mainstream media is repeating all of its worst mistakes from ’16. A nonpartisan observer can see this in every major story that makes headlines.
Here are but two examples:
Michael Flynn Prosecution
According to the MSM, this is all a distraction. There is absolutely zero whatsoever concerning about the Obama Administration’s involvement in Flynn’s investigation and subsequent legal travails. Nothing to see here, move along.
Hop on over to non-MSM sources or the President’s hatchet women/men, however, and the picture gets a lot more troubling. If it is true that the intelligence apparatus under President Barack Obama investigated Flynn, found nothing, and then used the Logan Act against the incoming administration’s national security advisor to eventually spin everything into the Mueller investigation, well, that seems like a huge problem. The Logan Act is almost certainly unconstitutional, which is one reason it’s only been used twice in over 200 years, and even its dubious intent was more legitimate than using it to hamstring members of incoming administrations.
Creating that sort of precedent for overreach by pretending it’s not even worth discussing seems like a very, very bad idea. Let’s not forget that Trump will eventually leave office, is unlikely to be a fan of the incoming administration, and politicians’ “it’s only cool when we do it” defense has worn thin.
Given Joe Biden’s central role in the Obama Administration (according to his campaign theme), ignoring the story as a distraction not worth dignifying is also an extremely dumb way to get him elected. The right-wing of the media isn’t simply going to drop the topic without further discussion and credible journalists (at least to nonpartisans) like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Mate, and Mollie Hemingway have identified more than enough smoke to investigate for further fire. These findings have been echoed by credible academics like Charles Lipson and Jonathan Turley.
In light of all this, “it’s just a distraction” looks highly disingenuous and leaves the problematic narrative unchallenged.
Tara Reade’s Accusation of Sexual Assault
Tara Reade’s allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her while the former worked for him during his time as a Senator was met with mostly silence by the mainstream media. Even after journalists Ryan Grim and Katie Halper broke the story to a wider audience, the major national outlets largely yawned. Now, they’re writing about the topic in the past tense, implying it is dead as Reade’s credibility has come under increasing and warranted question. Even fanatical #MeTooers who acknowledge there’s a problem in the coverage of Reade’s allegation can’t resist the urge to kick Reade’s reputation while it’s down.
The problem, of course, is that pesky Internet, which is here to remind you the real story is the indifference to and then skepticism of Reade shown by the very same people who almost immediately lionized Christine Blasey Ford.
Nobody troubled by the treatment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is likely to forget that every argument raised in defense of Biden—nobody can corroborate the assault, there is no evidence, the behavior is out of character, the accused’s history has already been vetted, the story changed, the accuser is politically motivated, the accuser has credibility issues, etc.— was raised in defense of Kavanaugh. Each one of them was not only dismissed, but those who raised them were frequently slandered as rape apologists.
Again, the right-wing meat grinder isn’t just going to drop this issue and the mainstream media’s posture isn’t persuasive outside Democratic echo chambers. That will hurt Joe Biden’s electoral chances.
The dynamic repeats itself in story after story.
The Russian collusion narrative never effectively dealt with the fact that Russians were already trying to screw with American elections and thus needed no help/encouragement/participation from the Trump campaign. The Russian election interference narrative ignored that every American voter knew well in advance of November 2016 that Russian operatives were the source of misinformation as well as anti-Clinton hacks, and were thus unlikely to be duped by the Kremlin efforts. The impeachment narrative glided over the fact that the Ukrainian president said he never felt pressured, which made claims of extortion or extortion-adjacent impropriety dubious from the jump. The coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic focuses like a laser on Trump’s flabby rhetoric and passive federal response while erasing China’s primary responsibility for what is a global pandemic as well as as the fact that America’s performance actually measures up favorably with that of its relevant peers. In each case, a cursory search of the web reveals reliable sources contradicting the MSM narratives and right-wing platforms amplifying these contradictions.
Given the regularity with which it arises, there is one conclusion: The transparent, pro-Biden/anti-Trump spin is not a bug of the mainstream media coverage; it is a feature. It’s an intentional decision made in service to the belief that Joe Biden must be elected President of the United States and Donald Trump must be defeated. In other words, it is a conscious decision to take the approach that didn’t work in 2016 and run it back again in 2020.
Except the Internet still exists. This is a real problem.
